The present invention relates in general to digital processing, and in particular to a system allowing computing environments to be treated as electronic documents or as software programs and to a set of services based on the system.
Although the software components of a computer—the operating system and the set of applications running on top of it—abstractly determine the notion of a “computing environment,” in today's practice this notion is closely tied to the underlying hardware as well. Thus, for instance, computer A is considered to be a Windows NT desktop, while computer B is considered to be a Linux server, and computer C a Windows 98 laptop. The bewildering variety of hardware devices reinforces this notion.
Furthermore, the notion of a computing environment can be extended, without loss of generality, to a collection of systems connected by a network. Again, in today's practice, this extended notion carries with it a close association to the underlying hardware, in particular to the individual computer's hardware and the networking hardware used for connecting these computers. For instance, a user connecting a laptop computer to a local area network may need to be aware of the vendor and type of the network card used.
This tight coupling between a computing environment and the underlying hardware, with the added complexity of a networked system, introduces a host of avoidable—yet presently insurmountable—issues to be dealt with by any user intending to buy, provide or use a computing environment.
For instance, an organization may decide to locate a computer in a conference room shared by the marketing and the engineering departments of the organization. The marketing department uses the computer for slide shows and requires the environment of the computer to include Microsoft Windows NT operating system and PowerPoint software. The engineering department uses the computer for product demonstrations and requires the environment to include Linux operating system. With prior art, the computer can provide one environment or the other but cannot readily be changed from one environment to another. The users are usually interested in their specific environments, not their specific computers.
As another example, a system administrator of an organization may be assigned to provide technical support for all computer users within the organization. If the system administrator needs to fix a problem in a user's computing environment, he/she needs to physically visit the user's location. Using prior art, there is no possible way for the administrator to transfer the user's environment to—or replicate the user's environment at—the administrator's location.
Thus, it is desirable to provide a system that decouples computing environments from the hardware as much as possible. Such a system will permit computing environments to be handled as abstractions, which are—at least partially—agnostic about hardware. Services based on such a system will provide increased flexibility for users and reduced maintenance for administrators. Thus the systems and services will be advantageous over prior art in improving the cost-benefit ratio of computing environments.